Archetypes of Cyberspace

I have a Writing page – but it missed this essay, one of the ones I spent a few years on. I have now added it to the writing page.

It is a long essay, it was itself a journey, began just like the one I am on in the blog right now. I doubt it many people have read it. I could find no links to it. I just read it through and found it to my liking, though I would want to edit it all over the place!

Here is a quote from the conclusion, linking the theme of the essay to psychotherapy.

By developing a sense of the ancient correspondences between elements such as Mercury, the planet Mercury, the younger brother of Apollo and the dragon’s teeth we are equipped to see psychologically into the stories of clients, not only about their surfing habits or the grief over lost email, but the mind space governed by Hermes as it appears in stories dreams. As we hear dreams and stories that have an element of exchange, commerce, theft, speed, journey, signposts, and so on we can see these as doorways to pursue to add depth.

The important conclusion that follows this exploration is not about individual work. It is about the psychotherapeutic frame we work in. Once we have grasped the archetypal qualities of cyberspace then we can see that psychotherapy itself is a subset of the larger information realm. Psychotherapy is a sort of cyberspace. Working to create communication and to delineate the limits of the space that occurs in is the job of the psychotherapist. Psychotherapy is not the only place where we enter into an imaginal space. The gods of cyberspace are sure to also govern the work of the psychotherapist.